Disney and Universal sue Midjourney for unauthorized character reproductions

Disney and Universal Pictures on Wednesday dragged Midjourney into federal court in Los Angeles, accusing the AI image generator of copyright infringement.

The companies accuse Midjourney of brazenly lifting their most iconic characters without permission, prompting them to take legal action against the AI image creator.

Midjourney ignored requests to halt illegal use of the images

In a lawsuit filed by seven corporate entities tied to the two studios, the entertainment giants charge that Midjourney tapped into their vast libraries to churn out uncountable likenesses of Darth Vader, Elsa, the Minions, and more, then distributed them freely, over and over again.

At the heart of Disney and Universal’s complaint lies a simple accusation.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

The studios.

Whether it’s a still image or a moving picture, they insist, unauthorized reproductions created by an AI tool are no less illegal than any other pirated work.

According to the suit, Midjourney ignored repeated requests to halt its use of copyrighted material or to introduce technological safeguards that would prevent further infringement.

Although Midjourney has yet to respond publicly, the lawsuit paints a picture of a San Francisco–based start-up that has chosen revenue over respect for intellectual property. With paid subscriptions accounting for roughly $300 million in sales last year, the company’s decision to release successive upgrades, each promising crisper, more detailed images, only sharpened the studios’ resolve.

Disney’s executive vice president and chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, struck a balance between optimism and admonition. In a statement, he lauded AI’s potential to augment human creativity while warning about the problem of piracy, no matter who, or what, is doing the copying.

“We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”

Gutierrez.

NBCUniversal’s general counsel, Kim Harris, echoed those sentiments, underscoring the lawsuit’s goal of defending the labor and investment behind the films and shows that captivate global audiences.

The studios want to stop Midjourney from further exploiting their material

This is not the first time Midjourney has been accused of overstepping copyright boundaries. Last year, a federal judge in California allowed a group of ten artists to continue their own infringement suit against Midjourney and other AI outfits, ruling that their allegation, that the companies scraped and stored copyrighted artwork without consent, was plausible enough to survive an early dismissal bid.

Behind the scenes, Midjourney’s founder, David Holz, has compared the service to a search engine, suggesting that it merely “learns” from existing images in much the same way a human might study a painting to improve their technique.

In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, he argued that if people are free to examine and then emulate pictures, so should AI, provided the end result doesn’t look like a direct clone.

But the crux of the studios’ case is that Midjourney goes well beyond inspiration, producing perfect facsimiles of beloved characters and then distributing them, sometimes as animations, without paying a nickel in licensing fees.

The complaint even includes screenshots of AI-generated images depicting Yoda wielding a lightsaber, Bart Simpson tearing down a skate park, Po from Kung Fu Panda delivering a kung fu kick, and Buzz Lightyear rocketing skyward.

As this legal showdown unfolds, it joins a growing roster of suits targeting AI developers, from OpenAI to Anthropic, who rely on vast troves of publicly available text, images, and other media to teach their algorithms.

While many of these companies invoke the “fair use” doctrine to justify their training methods, copyright holders are increasingly skeptical, planting their flags and demanding that technology giants respect the creative work that fuels their own innovations.

For now, Disney and Universal are asking the court for a preliminary injunction to stop Midjourney from further exploiting their copyrighted material. They’re also seeking damages, though the exact figure remains under wraps.

As the first blockbuster studios to wage war against an AI image generator, their battle could set a precedent for how intellectual property law applies in the age of machine learning, and for whether studios must write new rules or simply enforce the old ones.

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